“First Nations, Residential Schools, and the Americanization of the Holocaust: Rewriting Indigenous History in the United States and Canada”[1]
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ABSTRACT: Many indigenous groups have invoked the Holocaust to reinterpret past events, a trend which reflects its Americanization and cosmopolitanization. Presenting European colonization as a “holocaust”, activist historians in America, Canada and other western settler societies have used the Final Solution to repackage colonial history in starkly black and white terms. I pay particular attention to the debates in America and Canada over the genocidal implications of indigenous residential schooling. There is a twin danger involved. At one level the Holocaust is subjected to a process of trivialization. At another level, framing history through the Holocaust decontextualizes group histories by re-reading past victimization through a distinctive and wholly different series of events.
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In this article, I critique the widespread instrumentalization of the Holocaust in indigenous protest movements. Since the end of the Cold War, the moral lessons of the Holocaust have been subject to a process of “cosmopolitanization” and “Americanization” (Levy and Sznaider, 2004; Flanzbaum, 1999). In an age of identity politics, proving victimhood may potentially help social and ethnic groups gain increased attention for their plight, and encourage formal apologies and reparations (Calhoun, 1994: 25). As Smith has noted, even democratic societies rely on a “cultural hegemony” which privileges positive narratives of national history. This can take a severe toll on indigenous peoples, whose own experiences stand at odds with how the country wishes itself to be seen. As Smith explains, some groups “live with a twofold curse”:
First the substantive ills that they are forced to live with are at least in part the result of their traumatic or unjust history; but second, the very account of that past that has entered the memory of the majority of people in the society erases or obfuscates their trauma. Revising the historical account, therefore, becomes a way to gain visibility for the group and is the first step in gaining more social assistance in dealing with the residual ills (Smith: 2005: 15-16).
“Revising the historical account” through the Holocaust often resonates in western societies, where the centrality of the Jews in Christian history gives the Holocaust a special significance (Rubenstein, 1996, 24-5). Further, as the Holocaust is the best documented genocide, public attention (and debate) is almost always assured. Yet there is a twin danger involved. At one level the Holocaust is trivialized when its vocabulary and imagery are irresponsibly invoked, potentially deteriorating the Holocaust’s significance and normalizing anti-Semitism.
At another level, social and ethnic groups framing history through the Holocaust can easily decontextualize their own histories by re-reading past victimization through a very distinctive and wholly different series of events. Presenting European colonization as a “holocaust”, American activist-historians like David Stannard and Ward Churchill have used the Final Solution to repackage the colonization of the Americas as the biggest genocide in history, a precedent for the Holocaust. There are anti-Semitic undertones to much of this work, which presents indigenous people and Jews as competitors for public attention, apology, and reparations. Recently, this style of historical representation has migrated to Australia, Canada, and several other countries, including New Zealand (MacDonald, 2003). This article concentrates on the use of such discourse in the United States and Canada.
AMERICANIZING THE HOLOCAUST
The Holocaust’s emergence was a gradual process which took several decades to accomplish. A concomitant to the growing importance of the Holocaust was its “Americanization” – where America began to increasingly define its own national history against the Holocaust (Novick, 1999: 20; Flanzbaum, 1999). While largely dormant in public discussions of the War in the 1950s, the Holocaust came into its own during the 1960s. Events in Israel such as the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) and the Six Day War (1967) unleashed a flood of survivor memories and promoted public discussion (Marrus: 1987, 2; 4-5; Novick, 1999, 148-52; Friedlander, 1994, 155). In America, the civil rights movement and the growing fear amongst Diaspora Jews of “losing” Israel prompted increased remembrance during the late 1960s (Diner: 2004, 265-9).
During the 1970s, America’s national identity became increasingly tied to representations of its own past as the antithesis of Nazi Germany. Such perceptions helped reinforce American goodness, especially in the wake of the “national trauma” suffered during and after the Vietnam War (Ball: 2000, 4). 1978 is signposted as a crucial year. First, a neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois touched off a storm of public protest, while NBC’s miniseries “Holocaust” attracted some 120 million viewers (Doneson: 1996, 75). These events prompted President Carter to create a presidential commission on the Holocaust. This among other things, enshrined America’s liberation of the death camps as a central part American identity, promoted the role of America as a haven for survivors, and paved the way for the creation of the United StatesHolocaustMemorialMuseum (Greenspan: 1999, 45; Young: 1999, 73).
The post-Cold War era initiated a new era of engagement with the past. In 1993, Schindler’s List was screened, while the USHMM opened in WashingtonDC.The proximity of the USHMM to major monuments to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln was no accident. The Museum Council made clear that, “America is the enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide. … in act and word the Nazis denied the deepest tenets of the American people” (Young: 1999, 73). The Holocaust was thus interpreted as “the most un-American of crimes and the very antithesis of American values” (Cole: 2004, 138).
As Levy and Sznaider have argued, the Holocaust has created a “new, global narrative”, which emphasizes the need to protect human rights internationally (Levy and Sznaider, 2002: 89). The German admission of guilt, recognition of Jews as a nation, and compensation (through reparations to Israel) was the moment, Barkan posits, “at which the modern notion of restitution for historical injustices was born” (Barkan, 2001: xxiv). Holocaust survivors set the parameters for what other groups felt they could reasonably demand. These demands included “transitional justice” (punishment of the perpetrators and reparations from the perpetrators); “apologies and statements of regret”; then “efforts to commemorate past suffering” through forms of “communicative history” (Torpey, 2003: 6-7).
An “age of apologies” (Nytagodien and Neal, 2005: 465), heralded by “reparations politics” (Torpey, 2001) began in many western countries during the post-Cold War era. Governments, churches, and private firms were increasingly held to account for past actions against indigenous peoples and other disadvantaged groups. Old “heroic, forward-looking tales that underpinned the idea of progress for two centuries”, were now replaced by “narratives of injustice and crime…” (Torpey, 2001: 334). This has made the Holocaust a “kind of gold standard against which to judge other cases of injustice”. The Holocaust acted as a window of opportunity, giving hope to other groups by presenting a frame of reference and a model to follow (Torpey: 2001: 338). Absent the Holocaust, “other projects oriented to coming to terms with the past would not have been so successful”. Torpey continues that “widespread Holocaust consciousness, in turn, has been the water in which reparations activists have swum, defining much of the discourse they use to enhance their aims” (Torpey, 2003: 2-3).
Stein too notes the widespread appeal of the Holocaust as an “atrocity tale” par excellence, possessing “protagonist identify fields” (comparing oneself to the Jews) and “antagonist identity fields” (accusing one’s enemies of being Nazis). A series of binary opposites are created which help frame the protagonist’s case (Stein, 1998: 521-2). Indeed, during the 1990s, the Holocaust was instrumentalized in a number of ways. First, its strong black/white Manichaeism could be used to reign in contrarian group members, and encourage loyalty to the group. Second using extreme language helped present a united and morally righteous front to outsiders. Finally, the Holocaust allowed leaders to strongly promote their group against other groups in collective struggles for power and recognition.
DEBATING THE “AMERICAN HOLOCAUST”
The use of Holocaust imagery in indigenous movements has become widespread, in part reflecting the anger and frustration of many activists that the US government has yet to acknowledge and apologize for the sins of previous administrations (Friedberg, 2000). During the 1990s, historians of American Indian history like Stannard and Churchill presented the Americanization of the Holocaust as inherently destructive to indigenous interests, sugar-coating American history by highlighting its goodness to Jews, while suppressing its own dark past. They have set a template which indigenous activists in other countries have loosely followed.
In 1992, Stannard published American Holocaust, followed by Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide in 1997. Both Stannard and Churchill make widespread use of the Holocaust as a means of highlighting indigenous suffering, while openly criticizing the significance of the Holocaust in American life. This seems reasonable to both authors in light of the fact that the decimation of North and South America’s indigenous nations (at potentially 100 million casualties) was the largest genocide in history, with mortality rates hovering between 90-95 percent in most cases (Stannard, 1992: x; Churchill, 1997: 4). While the pre-conquest population of the United States can never be established with certainty, it did number in the millions before European colonisation, but by 1920 was reduced to less than 250,000 persons (Stiffarm and Lane, 1992: 37).
An important objective of Stannard and Churchill’s work has been to re-humanize indigenous victims of genocide, stressing their innocence and sophistication (Stannard, 1992: 239-40). By contrast, America’s founding fathers, from Washington and Jefferson to Jackson, are presented as Nazi-like killers (Stannard, 1992: 119-21; 241), infused as with a “virulent Anglo-Saxon supremacism” little different from “nazi Aryanist ideology” (Churchill, 1997: 211; 228-32).In these cases, any ambiguity about what the colonizers intended is stripped away. Seen through the Nazi lens, the “American Holocaust” is a continual killing process that covers five centuries.
A further goal of Stannard’s work has been to refute the long-held belief that disease was but an “inadvertent” or “unintended consequence” of colonialism. Stannard focuses on forms of killing shared by both the Holocaust and the American genocide: disease, forced labor, forced marches, and other conditions calculated to bring about the deaths of a target group. If disease and slave labour are part of the Holocaust, Stannard reasons, they must also be included as part of the “American Holocaust” (Stannard, 1996: 89; 258-60).
Holocaust uniqueness is also overtly challenged, and anti-Semitism is presented as a derivative form of hatred, little different than Christian hatred of indigenous peoples (Stannard, 1992: 184). The Third Reich was more a “crystallisation” of Columbus era themes such as “racial supremacism, conquest, and genocide”. Thus: “Nazism was never unique: it was instead only one of an endless succession of ‘New World Orders’ set in motion by ‘the Discovery’” (Churchill, 1997: 92). Claiming that Hitler was inspired by America’s success at killing its indigenous peoples, Stannard concludes that “on the way to Auschwitz the road’s pathway led straight through the heart of the Indians and of North and South America” (Stannard, 1992: 246).
In their work, Stannard and Churchill openly question the significance of the Holocaust, and display anti-Semitic undertones when taking aim at historians like Deborah Lipstadt and Steven Katz, who promote Holocaust uniqueness. Institutional denial by the American establishment is “common … even readily understandable, if contemptible” (Stannard, 1996: 151). However both men slate Holocaust historians and “a substantial component of Zionism” for promoting an “exclusivist” interpretation of the Holocaust. “Exclusivists” engage in “holocaust denial”, since by denying that other historical atrocities are genocide, they deny other “holocausts” – which both Churchill and Stannard use interchangeably and provocatively with genocide (Churchill, 1997: 7; 11; 30-1; 36).
There are justifiable concerns about the Stannard-Churchill thesis. First, it suggests that the vast majority of indigenous peoples, even those killed by epidemics, were the victims of intentional genocide. While some disease was deliberately spread, most epidemics raged ahead of the explorers and colonizers, and were hardly comparable to conditions in Nazi ghettoes (Barkan, 2003: 122). Europe too had forty-one smallpox epidemics and pandemics from 1520 to 1899, yet here no one suggests that intentional genocide is at work (Stiffarm and Lane, 1992: 31). At another level, there seems little reason for a full-scale assault on Holocaust historians. While denial (and ignorance) of indigenous genocide is widespread, the authors concentrate their attack on one ethnic/religious group, whose scholarship differs little from that of other American historians.
Stannard and Churchill, while influential in many indigenous movements, force us into accepting a devil’s bargain. Recognizing and sympathizing with the suffering of indigenous peoples now also seems to involve accepting the counterfactual that Holocaust historians are hypocrites and manipulators, and further: that the Holocaust’s current status is merely “the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labor by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea” (Stannard, 1996: 167). In short, the invocation of the Holocaust sensationalizes debate, stopping meaningful discussion from occurring. It provides ammunition for those who deny or downplay indigenous suffering and helps alienate the general public.
FIRST NATIONS AND THE “CANADIAN HOLOCAUST”
Canada did commit forms of genocide during the colonial era. Newfoundland’s Beothuk were entirely decimated by low intensity conflict and starvation in the 18th century. Nova Scotia’s Mi’kmaq seem to have been victims of intentional killing, through the spread of poisoned food and massacres, also in the 18th century (V. Miller, 2004: 259-60). While Canadians know more about America’s brutal treatment of its indigenous people, the Canadian experience has also been bleak. In the 1990s, “Levels of unemployment, undereducation, violent death, imprisonment, and ill health outstrip[ed] those of other Canadians in virtually all age brackets” (Fleras and Elliott, 1992: 8-9; 16-18). Others have described the conditions on Indian reserves as “not inconsistent with purposeful genocide”, going so far as to claim an “ethno-spiritual holocaust” of indigenous peoples (Boldt, 1993: 61).
The literature generally recognizes four distinct phases in Settler-Aboriginal relations. The first period was marked by “symbiosis and cooperation” and endured from early contact to 1867. The 1763 Royal Proclamation recognized aboriginal control over their lands, termed vast tracts of land “Indian country” and forbade European settlement except by royal license (Consadine and Consadine, 2001: 50-1). The second phase, “Assimilation, protection, civilization, and absorption” ran from 1867 to 1945. Confederation created a two-tiered system with federal and provincial governments which froze out native self-government (Fleras and Elliott, 1992: 40-1). Aboriginal people lost their status and were soon treated as “wards, or guardians, of federal authority”, and were consequently denied the ability to represent themselves in provincial or federal legislatures, law courts, or land markets (Hall, 2003: 475).
The “need” for European settlement and agricultural lands gave way to a series of thirteen numbered treaties between 1871 and 1929. Aboriginal peoples surrendered land for settlement in return for concessions from the government such as reserve land allotted on a per capita basis, and a variety of privileges, tax exemptions and government services. However in most cases, the treaty process “was riddled with deceit”, being seen as vehicle to expediently separate aboriginal peoples from their land (Fleras and Elliott, 1992: 30-1; Schouls, 2000: 40). The Department of Indian Affairs was created in 1880, expressly for the purpose of first taking control of aboriginal lands, then later, promoting forms of social control and assimilation (Schouls, 2000: 41).
The period from 1945 to 1973 is known as “Canadianization”, when attempts were made to integrate Aboriginal peoples and given them formal equality (Fleras and Elliott, 1992: 42-3). In 1969, the Trudeau government’s White Paper sought to terminate treaties, privatize and municipalize the reserve system, and dismantle Indian Affairs. These attempts were met with outrage, amid charges of “cultural genocide” (Hall, 2003: 496-7). The final phase of “Limited Aboriginal Autonomy” continues still. The defeat of the White Paper demonstrated a level of aboriginal anger and activism not previously seen. Aboriginal groups used this newfound sense of unity and purpose to seek justice and equality on their own terms. In 1971, the federal government provided a Core Funding Program, and entertained “limited autonomy” – the return of land to and more control for aboriginal leaders over local funding, etc (Fleras and Elliott, 1992: 43-6). The 1982 Constitution Act (Section 35) formally recognized “aboriginal people” as including Indians, Metis, and Inuit (Russell, 2000: 3-4).
The 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples has been a landmark in coming to terms with the past. The 3,500 page Report consisted of five volumes, comprising submissions by aboriginal groups and individuals recalling their experiences. Four main types of mistreatment were highlighted: physical and sexual abuse in Residential Schools (as well as their goals of assimilation and cultural destruction); unequal treatment of aboriginal veterans from both world wars; forced relocations of aboriginal communities; and finally the “cultural aggression of the Indian Act”, which banned indigenous customs and laid the basis for forms of “internal colonialism” (Cairns, 2003: 77-8).
INDIGENOUS RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLING
In 1879, a residential school was established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which acted a model for the further 500 schools established in America, through which 100,000 Native Americans passed until compulsory schooling ended in the 1930s (Milloy: 1996: 13; Smith, 2006; Wallace, 1995). Strongly influenced by the American system, Canadian residential schools were first established by the mid 1880s, and continued until the 1970s. Aboriginal children were to be assimilated and made productive members of Canadian society, as workers and servants at the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Thus, school days consisted of a half day of studies, then a half day of trades-related activities: blacksmithing, carpentry or auto mechanics for boys, sewing, cooking and other domestic activities for girls. In this the federal government worked in partnership with the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and UnitedChurches, who administered the day to day operations of the schools (Milloy, 1999).